The Pope's Last Crusade

by Peter Eisner

  He began to do so with regularity, with general declarations and focused commentaries. He often ranged increasingly into the realm of politics and pleas for peace. “Few events in the history of the world can compare with the profound impact the Head of the Holy Roman See had during his address direct to the entire planet,” said an editorial in the New York Herald. “Such a thing could not have been foreseen by any preceding pope. This is a miracle of science, and no less a miracle of faith,” the editorial said.

  Perhaps it was a triumph of science if not a miracle, but Vatican Radio served to provide Pius XI a world audience. Now, seven years later, in 1938, the pope’s voice and the translation of his word would extend beyond the faithful; he could now exert an editorial, political, even moral force in these years of challenging the Nazis, and increasingly stood alone. Vatican Radio now broadcast in Italian, English, German, and French, an alternative and a moral compass in Europe and beyond. There was no other comparable voice worldwide that could generate impact and controversy and sway emotions like the pope, using his electronic pulpit and his Vatican printing press that produced the Osservatore Romano.

  The pope knew the radio provided a moral leader with an opportunity to reach beyond the confines of space in real time. The power of technology was an obvious new opportunity. All other media, radio, and newspapers in Italy were controlled by Mussolini’s Fascists, who lashed out against the pope for “peevish” silence on Hitler’s visit to Rome.

  During Hitler’s visit to Rome, the Times of London reported criticism by an Italian Fascist newspaper, representing Mussolini’s point of view, blasting the pope and the Vatican for being “the only newspaper in the world which has ignored the Führer’s presence in Rome. It is certainly far from edifying to see an old, austere journal like that of the Vatican City lose its reason and sense of proportion.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Flying Cardinal

  Hyde Park, New York, June 1938

  PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT WAS keenly interested in developments in Rome during the spring and summer of 1938 and received frequent personal and direct reports from the U.S. ambassador to Italy, William Phillips. Roosevelt had chosen Phillips for the post in 1936, an interesting and important choice. He graduated from Harvard University in 1900, three years ahead of Roosevelt and a year before LaFarge. Phillips stayed on at Cambridge for three more years attending Harvard Law School. There was no indication that LaFarge and Phillips knew each other. If Phillips and Roosevelt weren’t friends at Harvard, they became close in 1910 when Phillips married Roosevelt’s second cousin, Caroline Astor Drayton, an heir to the Astor fortune. Phillips and his wife were close to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (she was of course also a relative of Caroline and the two had played together as children) and recalled spending private evenings at the White House whenever schedules permitted. Phillips was a Republican, but the difference of parties was no barrier. Aside from his kinship with the president, Roosevelt thought Phillips would be a good intermediary with Mussolini—as a member of the Republican opposition, the Italians might see Phillips as being independent minded and approachable. Phillips’s immediate previous assignment as undersecretary of state, second ranking at the State Department to Cordell Hull, also had been arranged by Roosevelt. Like so many others at the State Department in the 1930s, Phillips had been slow to recognize the danger presented by Hitler and the Nazi Party. Diplomats in Germany, notably the U.S. ambassador to Berlin, William E. Dodd, warned early on about Hitler’s arms buildup and the treatment of Jews, but the State Department paid little attention. Orders were to deal with Germany, as always, in accord with the niceties of bland diplomacy.

  In two years in Italy, Phillips had realized quickly that Dodd’s warning from Germany had been accurate. Roosevelt had now charged him with a general task—to develop good relations with the Italian government and to use every possible means to dissuade Mussolini from tightening his alliance with Hitler. Roosevelt had encouraged Phillips to bypass protocol and, in addition to routine mission reports back to the State Department, he expected his ambassador-relative-friend to send frequent personal updates on the state of affairs. When he faltered, Roosevelt chided him to keep up the correspondence.

  Thanks to Ambassador Phillips’s letters, the president was not surprised to hear that Pope Pius XI was being so confrontational with Hitler. Pius was clearly opposed to the Nazis, even though his top aides didn’t appear to be in full agreement with him. In 1936, Roosevelt had met with Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic leader ever to visit the United States. The president was rightly ebullient, having just won reelection with a surprising landslide. Two days later, he was relaxed, even amused when Pacelli arrived at Hyde Park for a luncheon chat.

  News media had been calling Pacelli “The Flying Cardinal,” because of his unprecedented, weeklong, coast-to-coast U.S. airplane tour. People bowed before him when he laid a wreath at George Washington’s home in Mount Vernon, visited the Empire State Building, gazed at the Boulder Dam and the Grand Canyon, and blessed Niagara Falls and the Golden Gate Bridge. His public pronouncements had been mild statements in favor of peace and calls for adherence to Christian teachings.

  Some speculated that the visit was an attempt to establish diplomatic relations between the United States and the Holy See, which had been broken off following the dissolution of the Papal States in 1867. Officials in the United States and Britain, secular governments with majority Protestant populations, questioned the value of securing this relationship with the Vatican, but Roosevelt recognized the political advantage it could give him with Catholic constituencies in key states. The pope may have wanted to link the Vatican’s worldview with that of the United States—total opposition to Nazism.

  Joseph P. Kennedy, FDR’s wealthy backer and chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission, was accompanying the Vatican emissary. So was the Most Reverend Francis Spellman, who had been sent home from the Vatican and was now the auxiliary bishop of Boston. Spellman and Kennedy were important American Catholics, both destined for bigger things.

  The cardinal and his entourage had taken a morning train from New York City, riding in a private car. Bright autumn sun shimmered off the majestic Hudson River as the train wove out of the city, past Sing Sing Prison, and close to the riverbank, where seagulls and ducks were feeding in the Tappan Zee and where residents feared a proposed bridge would damage the wetlands. The Vatican mission arrived at Poughkeepsie, a few miles south of Hyde Park just after noon.

  Pacelli had declined a change of clothes offered by Spellman, who like the other accompanying Catholic clergy was dressed in a simple black suit and Roman collar. Pacelli stood out, regaled in his cape, crimson-appointed robes, and large metal crucifix. Roosevelt had sent a White House reception party to the station to pick them up.

  The White House reported that the president and the cardinal “discussed American social affairs and their mutual observations of trends in the United States.” But in fact, the conversation was far more specific and would have ended badly had Roosevelt not maintained his good humor. He discovered quickly that Pacelli was fixated on Communism.

  The president recalled the meeting during a dinner conversation six years later. He described the encounter as a “mental sparring contest,” according to Florence Kerr, an administration official who was one of the dinner guests. FDR said he and Pacelli “chewed on that for three days. He [Pacelli] went back to Rome saying that the great danger in America is that it will go communist. I told him it wouldn’t . . . I said, I think they are just as apt to go Fascist as they are to go communist.” The back-and-forth continued: the president scoffed and the cardinal insisted.

  “The greatest danger in America is that it will go Communist,” Pacelli repeated more than once.

  “The great danger in America is that it will go Fascist,” FDR replied.

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No!” Pacelli repeated more forcefully. “Mr. President,
you simply do not understand the terrible importance of the Communist movement.”

  “You just don’t understand the American people,” the president replied.

  The conversation ended at an impasse, apparently civilly so. By midafternoon, the cardinal was on his train car headed back to New York.

  Two days later, after being greeted by thousands of Catholic schoolchildren outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Pacelli rode to Pier 59 and boarded the Italian liner Conte di Savoia for his return trip to Italy.

  IN 1937, Pope Pius released With Deep Anxiety, his first great assault on Nazism, a papal encyclical that confronted Hitler and his Gestapo. The American and British governments took note. Suddenly, Pope Pius XI appeared to be on the same wavelength as Roosevelt. Officials in Washington and London thought the pope could be engaged in the fight against Hitler, and in particular against Hitler’s growing courtship of Mussolini. Even if “the Pope could not push Hitler,” one British analyst said, “he could certainly push at Mussolini. He might even be able to push Mussolini away from Hitler.”

  By 1937, onetime critics, including diplomats and Jewish leaders, praised Pius XI as a leading voice for peace and liberty. The Nazis tried to spread rumors that the pope, born into a traditional Italian family in northern Italy, was actually a Communist and secretly Jewish; they spouted similar nonsense about Roosevelt.

  The pope’s growing criticism of Hitler may have sparked interest in Washington, but it produced great anxiety in the Vatican, particularly for Cardinal Pacelli. Beyond being considered second to the throne, Pacelli had been groomed all his life to be papabile—a future candidate to be pope.

  Eugenio was born in 1876, one of four children. His father, Fillippo, a prominent canonical lawyer, eventually became dean of the Vatican Sacra Rota Romana, the Holy See’s high court of appeals. His mother, Virginia, had twelve brothers and sisters; two had entered the priesthood and two were nuns. Pacelli clung to his mother, who made sure his upbringing was centered around the church. He spent his childhood in several well-off but modest apartments in central Rome, never more than half an hour’s walk from the Vatican. He had served as an altar boy and sometimes put on clerical robes to play-act the role of a priest celebrating Mass. He was sent to Catholic elementary schools and then to a public nonreligious school, where he was an excellent student. He was also a music lover who enjoyed the classics; he played violin and piano in accompaniment of his two sisters.

  When he was thirteen, he wrote a straightforward, lighthearted autobiographical profile that described his appearance: “I am of average height. My figure is slender, my face rather pale, my hair chestnut and soft, my eyes black, my nose rather aquiline. I will not say much of my chest, which to be honest, is not robust. Finally, I have a pair of legs that are long and thin, with feet that are hardly small.”

  He began his religious studies at the Gregorian University, close to the family house, but left the university after a few months for undefined health reasons. His sister later said the ailment involved problems with eating seminary food. After he recovered, he received extraordinary permission to study for the priesthood at home without ever having lived in a seminary. His ordination in 1899 was attended by bishops and even cardinals. It was unusual for a novice to draw such attention, but it shows that even at age twenty-three, he was already on track as a potential papabile.

  He rose quickly, working his way up from a lower-ranking job at the Vatican Secretariat of State to subsecretary and then secretary of ecclesiastical affairs. He was immediately thrust into diplomat affairs when he was sent to England in 1901 to deliver Pope Leo XIII’s condolences for the death of Queen Victoria. He met Winston Churchill on a second trip to London in 1908. At the time, Pacelli was thirty-two, and Churchill, who was thirty-four, had already been a Member of Parliament for eight years.

  Pacelli was appointed the pope’s official representative to Bavaria in 1917 and then for all of Germany. He remained as the apostolic delegate to Germany until 1929 when Pius XI recalled him to Rome, elevated him to cardinal, and eventually named him secretary of state. Pacelli’s time away had given him a passion for all things German. He loved German automobiles, and according to Monsignor Joseph Hurley, who worked for him, “was a devotee of [Richard] Wagner’s music—the sturdy, triumphal, surging kind . . . not the softer compositions.” He spent summer vacations in Switzerland where he could keep up his fluency in the language. He also had a rather bossy and controversial German housekeeper, Sister Pasqualina Lehnert, who served him for forty years.

  Pius and Pacelli had strikingly different backgrounds. The pope came from the north, Pacelli was Roman; Pacelli was tall and gangly, the pope was short and stocky; perhaps most important, the pope was taken to making rash emotional decisions, while Pacelli, the deliberative diplomat, was slow and methodical in his decision-making process.

  Pacelli was careful to submit humbly to the pope’s wishes, yet he did not always follow those orders exactly. There had been times when he delayed or altered the pope’s orders or public statements. Other times, he argued gently and directly with the pope to tone down some of his outbursts against Hitler and Mussolini. He thought it was prudent to not incite retaliation by Hitler or by Mussolini for rash statements.

  Despite their contrasting personalities, Pius and Pacelli worked together well. Many at the Vatican said Pius himself realized he was a rash and impetuous leader, and he wanted a cerebral, cautious diplomat at his side, even if he might not heed the advice. The pope did not take much counsel from others, but Pacelli managed to inject his point of view, which most often tried to temper the rough edges of policy, all for what he saw as the good of the Vatican. Many in the church believed the relationship between Pacelli and the pope was based on mutual dependence—the pope recognized that he needed that form of counterbalance to his fiery approach.

  Castel Gandolfo, June 26, 1938

  At the time when Hitler was taking over Austria and Czechoslovakia and forming his alliance with Mussolini, Pope Pius found himself with few allies among the highest-ranking men surrounding him. His subordinates, especially Cardinal Pacelli, who happened to be a good friend of Ledóchowski, were constantly begging him to temper his anger. The pope’s previous encyclical against Nazism in 1937, With Deep Anxiety, had provoked attacks on Catholic priests in Germany and almost caused a rupture in relations between the Vatican and the Nazis, much to the dismay of Pacelli and others around him. Every time the church spoke out, it faced a wave of reprisals.

  Now Pius intended to go much further with this new encyclical. John LaFarge was to produce a strong statement that would make international headlines. Not only would he fervently reject anti-Semitism, he would challenge other Catholic leaders to speak out and pressure Hitler and Mussolini to curtail their measures against the Jews. Although the pope knew such a statement could bring on new, even stronger attacks against Catholics, which most church leaders feared were too risky, he was willing to go forward and fight Hitler on moral grounds.

  As always, the pope was hemmed in by bureaucracy. He wanted LaFarge to work in secrecy, and he might even have placed him in seclusion if he had had the infrastructure to do so on his own. To use LaFarge, Pius was obliged to call in Wlodimir Ledóchowski, who, like Pacelli and most others at the Vatican, had no interest in inciting Hitler.

  Pius had always withstood the pressures from the rest of the curia, but now his flagging health made it uncertain that he would have the time and the strength to control those around him. He had summoned LaFarge on his own without Pacelli’s involvement even though the secretary of state was at Castel Gandolfo when LaFarge arrived. The pope had avoided telling Ledóchowski ahead of time because he knew how the Jesuit leader would react.

  But on Sunday morning, June 26, Pius summoned Ledóchowski to Castel Gandolfo. Pius, who never conducted business on the telephone, was following up on what he promised LaFarge the day before by briefing the Jesuit superior general on the new encyclical. The pope most likely aske
d Ledóchowski to keep this a secret, even though he knew such a prospect was unlikely considering what a seedbed of gossip the Vatican was.

  If Pacelli was the second-most-important person at the Vatican, Ledóchowski ran a close third. As leader of the worldwide Jesuit order—he was known as “the Black Pope,” or the superior general, or more commonly, the general—he was by no means a rival to the pontiff, but he was an all-powerful, forceful man in the lives of the Jesuits and all Catholics. Ledóchowski was not a cardinal, and no Jesuit had ever been elevated to the pontificate. He had been superior general since 1915 and had been in Rome almost without break since then, giving him more seniority at the Holy See, in terms of physical presence at least, than even Pope Pius XI.

  Pacelli and Ledóchowski were confidants in constant contact with long tenures in the curia, and they were among the most proficient political operators at St. Peter’s. While Pacelli was a member of the so-called black nobility of Rome—families that were unofficial courtiers at the Vatican—Ledóchowski was properly a Polish count. He was born in the Austrian Empire near Vienna in 1866 to Count Anton Ledóchowski, a noble of Polish origin. Count Anton served Emperor Franz Joseph as royal chamberlain, and one of his brothers, Mieczysław, rose to the prominent Vatican rank of cardinal prefect of the Holy Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

  Ledóchowski’s influence on church doctrine was well known. He sometimes sought to change the pontiff’s mind on key issues that mattered to him, but his efforts were usually futile. He had asked the pope on several occasions, for example, to be more forceful in condemning Communism when he was criticizing Fascism—as a way of balancing the scales. The pope no longer sought balance; he now believed that Nazism was a greater danger than Communism. This was a major change of perspective not shared by a majority at the Vatican, though it had been recognized for some time by others. As the journalist Dorothy Thompson had said, after being thrown out of Nazi Germany for speaking her mind: “National Socialism is more menacing to Catholicism than Communism. For whereas Communism is atheistic, National Socialism is Satanic.”